You are currently browsing the monthly archive for June 2006.
Well,
I have added a small button in the lower section of the right hand frame that will link to a listing of registered websites that are physically close to where I am. It’s an interesting idea. Want to check out what’s around you? Well, there ya go. It’s call geoURL. I found this just by chance so I decided to register and play with it a bit. Here’s the link for what’s near me. Not a lot. Mostly weather related or tides. Too bad that the Monterey Aquarium isn’t linked, or Cannery Row, etc etc… But if this idea grows then more and more will be added to the database. It’s a simple thing to add your site.
Here’s the link for my location.
Toy’s toys toys.
We did a trip up to San Juan Bautista a few weeks ago. It’s an interesting town with a ton and a half of history. San Juan Bautista literaly means Saint John the Baptist. It was thusly named by the franciscan friars who built the mission back in 1797, yep that’s 1797, it’s not a mistype. The mission was completed in about 1812 and has been occupied ever since.
We were lucky enough to wander around the mission grounds on a fairly quiet day. There weren’t a lot of tourists that day. We had actually gone there to check out a “Peddlers Fair” in the main town itself and decided to walk over a couple of blocks to check out the mission. What you don’t notice in the above picture is that to the right of the mission (North side) in this picture is a small cemetary with over 4000 (yes 4 thousand) unmarked graves of local native American Christians and Europeans.
This is a shot of the cemetery. They must have stacked the people one on top of another to get over 4000 into this small an area, even giving them 200 years to do it.
Here is a picture of a statue of Friar Fermin de Lasuen, the friar who helped set up and create the 15 California missions including this one.
If you look in the background of this photo you will see the San Andreas Fault. It runs through the valley right behind the mission. You can’t actually see it, but it’s there. In fact the mission had to be rebuilt at one point because a large earthquick nocked it down. Oops.
Here’s a picture of the ladies taking a moments rest in the fairly cool outer walkway of the mission. Resting up for more adventures.
A friend of mine put up an article on her blog Crabby’s Kitchen, about her first impressions on coming home after Katrina. That made me think that maybe I would put up the following notes. This was something I wrote only a few months after moving away from Mississippi. It’s just some thoughts and experiences I had as Katrina started coming our way. Anyhow, here it is.
My family and I ended up riding out Hurricane Katrina at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. The eye of the storm went right over us. The family actually went out and stood in the eye of the worst disaster to ever hit our county. We rode it out, and we survived the worst that the bloody thing could throw at us. At the time we had no idea of the damage that was happening around us. We were lucky. To tell the truth we were very, very lucky, and at the time had no idea of just how lucky. Our house survived with only minor damage. Our family made it through the storm alive, heck, even the dog and cat survived. We were lucky. There were so many around us that weren’t.
My wife, three daughters (twin 6 year olds and a 10 year old) and I all lived in Diamondhead Mississippi. We were there 1 year and 1 day before Katrina came and said hello. I worked for IBM at the Naval Oceanographic Office, NAVO, which is located on Stennis Space Center, MS. Which also happened to end up as FEMA’s command and control center after the storm. We watched the storm coming our way with the same disregard/worry that we did all the other storms that year. They always seemed to miss us or weaken to the point of not being a danger just before landfall. Thus we didn’t evacuate. That and we were between paychecks and light on money. Heck, to tell it like it was, we were broke. The closest family was in Montana, not really an option. So we waited and watched and worried.
On Sunday morning things were looking pretty grim. Lucky for us NAVO was considered a refuge of last resort for staff and family. That and I was the only IBM specialist to stick around, I’m something of a supercomputing specialist. As such, as soon as I walked in the door with my family I was considered part of the ride out crew, and thus considered essential personnel. (NAVO is a very large computer center for Navy research.) We had a safe place to stay only a short distance from home. Not only were we allowed in, I was immediately put to work. We started opening offices up, conference rooms, hallways. Putting people in every nook and cranny available. Not even the stairwells were safe from being used. There were children of all ages, elderly, wives, husbands, you name it. We made beds out of blankets, air mattresses, whatever. We all, and I mean all, believed that we would be there for the night and maybe for part of the next day. It looked rough. But, so did Ivan, Dennis, Cindy, and several other storms before this.
Across the street the NASA building was filling up with staff, family, and people from the surrounding area. That building was about 3 times the size of ours with the cafeteria in it. Since our building was a Navy building with some extremely large computer systems in it, we had tighter security and thus we only had staff, family of staff, and Navy personnel, and still we were tight on room.
The day wore on, the winds kept picking up. News from southern Louisiana was bad. The day wore on. Things started to get tense. I took my laptop, a monitor, some chairs, some boxes, speakers stolen from my friend Pat’s desk, and set up the first and only “Stennis Theater” at the end of a hallway for the kids. We had tons of DVD’s. Movie after movie was played to keep the kids entertained. We had popcorn and snacks for the kids.
As the night progressed the winds kept getting stronger and stronger. Some slept. Others tossed and turned. Some spent the whole night in front of the small tv that had been set up in the hallway. Watching and waiting. I was lucky, I was busy. I had things to take my mind off what was happening outside, but even I kept stopping and would stare at the tv. Waiting, wondering, not really believing. Not many people slept that night, as the winds slowly built up.
It was a long night. For the rest of my life I will remember the quiet of the hallways. People laying in the semi dark. The flickering of the TV down at the end of the hall. The quiet whispers. The way everything was hushed, tense, with an underlying layer of scared. The way people would look to me because I was busy, had a badge, kept meeting with the powers that be, and acted like I knew what the hell I was up to. People kept asking me what was up, what did I know, what had I heard. Even though, just like everyone else, I had no idea, no concept of what was, and about to happen to the world around us. Later, this would haunt my dreams.
Can you feel it? Can you possibly imagine what that’s like? The nervous anticipation, the dark crowded hallways, the news showing us the wrath of mother nature headed our way. Knowing that it’s headed straight for you and you can do nothing more, just wait for it to hit. Now remember, the worst hasn’t even begun yet. The storm is coming, but isn’t yet upon us, and we had no idea of how bad it would get.
I was one of the lucky ones. We survived. We moved out of Mississippi in December and moved to Pacific Grove. My family is alive and with me here. We all made it, and yet one of my twins has been having problems, nightmares, anger, etc. And then here I am, the rational one, I see the Navy do an awards ceremony, giving out all these “thanks you”, medals, and what all, to folks that supported the Katrina effort. But were NEVER there! I was so irrationally angry that I had to walk away. I couldn’t speak I was so pissed off. The only thing going through my head was “I didn’t see a single sorry ONE of you there!!” How DARE you!! I know this is nothing more than a stupid reaction. But I can’t stop myself. I know that over time things won’t be so sensitive. But right now I can’t help it.
Katrina kicked a lot of us in the teeth. Some a lot worse than others. There are days that I’m amazed I even get out of bed. Everyday that goes by it gets a little more and more like a dream that happened to someone else.
Here is a link to a few pictures of our house and the surrounding area.
Well it seems I’m on a science kick again today. On my ride in, which takes about 30 minutes, instead of listening to some Billy Idol, Southern Discomfort, Perlman, Heifetz, or some other odd music that’s on my ipod, I decided to listen to the Feynman lecture series again. Now those of you who don’t know who Richard Feynman was, well, you’ve missed out on a lot. I also really recommend his lecture series.
Richard Feynman was probably one of the greatest teachers of complex ideas of all time. I’m talking, he ranks up there with the greatest in history. The man would take an hour or hour and a half and do a lecture on the most complex of subjects imaginable, and do it to in such a way that a classroom full of freshman would walk away and go “Ahhhhhh, NOW I get it.” If you think you know or understand a subject, there is an easy way to tell. Try to teach it to a group of people, without buzz words, without math, without complex symbology, if it can’t be explained in simple easy to understand language, then you don’t know it as well as you think you do. Heck, I taught a class on computers to a bunch of grade school kids. Should have been a cake walk. HELLO! I don’t think so. Let’s see you explain cache memory buffering to a kid, let alone the way a worm can do a buffer overflow exploit.
Anyhow. Back to Feynman, do a search on his name. You might find some interesting information. Little tidbits of interesting information, things that will make you do a little more searching, maybe even grab some of his books to read. He was a very very interesting person. He helped build the atom bomb, would break into locked safes and leave notes for fun, loved to drum, helped the world understand the electroweak force, etc etc. And was just another bloke going through life. I am always fascinated by just the little things in a persons life. Like when Omni in 1979 interviewed Feynman and titled the article “The Smartest Man in the World.” Richards mother responded with this quote “Our Richie? The world’s smartest man? God help us!”. You’ve got to love your mom for keeping a person from getting too swelled a head.
Or how about this snippet of a poem titled “Fun with Physics.”
Galileo and Newton and Einstein and Bohr
Are egg-headed heroes of legend and lore.
In the annals of science they’re bona fide giants,
The belles of the physicists’ ball.
But their brains notwithstanding, you’ve got to admit
That for jocular genius, for wisdom with wit,
For sheer creativity and hyperactivity,
It’s Feynman who’s king of them all!
I don’t know about the rest of humanity. But, personally, I don’t want to go down in the history books as the finder of some mathematical function, or new physical tidbit, or even the builder of some thing. I’d rather go down as one crazy son of a gun who did some really neat things in life and made people ponder what they were doing. Just a thought.
Dr. Richard Feynman
1918-1988
Nobel Laureate, Physicist, Teacher, Inspiration.
Have you ever been glad that you grew up in a time when they didn’t have Riddlin or any of these other brain lobotomizing drugs? I got to thinking about it today. I was working on some problems on AIX, some auditing issues, in one terminal session, had another two sessions open into linux to check some things, had a game of freecell going, a link open to several different sites on FPGA’s and reconfigurable computing systems, had a paper on my desk discussing the cell processor I was perusing, plus I was handling any items that broke on the systems. I literally spent my day bouncing between the different screens in this constant, random, wander.
I can’t speak for others, but I actually find that I do my best work when I have at least 4-5 things going that I can toggle between. For some reason that makes my brain work a tad better. I actually concentrate more on each item for a short time then move on to something else for a bit, bounce back, off to something else, back again. I actually get more done that way than if I try to just work on one item. Is that normal? It is for me. I can’t imagine what I would be like now if my parent had decided that a good old chemical lobotomy was in order, so I could quote, concentrate better, unquote. I may have done a lot better in school. But would that have made me better? Tough question that.
I do think about that ocassionally. Now, I’ve been reading some on these new brain enhancing drugs that are the big rage at the colleges. Would they really help a person study and learn better? Is it a good idea to do something like that? The real upside, at least to me, about them is that they are short term reactions. You take a smart pill and be able to study better for 12 hours or so. I guess having a short term effect doesn’t bother me as much as something that would change my personality for long periods of time. Now, understand, I don’t condone these so called smart pills. But you have to ask yourself, “what if they really worked?”
What if you could take a pill, sit down and study like a devil for 8-12 hours straight and remember and cogitate the information it would have taken you a week to learn normally. Is that fair to the students who don’t take smart pills? Is this like a body builder taking steroids? Or are we as a society so wrapped up in what is and isn’t fair that we would just disadvantage ourselves because we thought something like this wasn’t fair. Imagine being able to do in two years of enhanced study what it might take 4+ years to do. So, do 4 years of enhanced study instead of the 6-8 to get the knowledge needed for a PhD. Hmmmm……
Being the classic under achiever it sure does look like a nice plan. Take a few pills a week, study like hell, get good grades, graduate early, move on to other things. Or better yet. Go the 4 years and over achieve, get a Dr. put in front of your name. Just cause.
Blue sky world. Not a cloud to be seen. Sorry folks. Nothing comes without a price. Sure would be nice if it were that easy. But give it a few more years. Let the geneticists and bioinformatics folks do some playing around. Maybe we could all double our IQ’s with a little blue pill every day. Something to think about at least.
If anyone actually hit’s this web page they might notice I have added a small script/applet on the right that shows the readers IP address and the type of OS/Browser being used. Well, this logs to a file where I can check it out later.
And this is where it get’s interesting. My little web page is getting hits from Hong Kong, China, Canada, Japan, and many other places, and here’s the kicker. All these odd ball hits are all using the EXACT same configuration. Hmmmmm…. So, when was the last time you used Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98). All of these odd ball hits are exactly the same. Makes one wonder.
I also see hits from Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp;) and Sphere Scout&v4.0 (beta) which both turn out to be blog search bots. Hmmm… I might have to look myself up some time.
By the way. I am using http://www.hostip.info/index.html
which will show a geographic location for a lot of the IP addresses. It misses a bunch, but at least I can get some idea of where some of the few hits are coming from. Besides the ones above I’ve been tagged from San Francisco, San Diego, Kentucky, and Virginia. Kind of fun to see.
Well,
I’ve started to ride my bike to work again. It’s roughly 7 miles or so each direction. A nice ride. I start down the road and head for the ocean.
I then ride down towards Lovers Point. This is a nice park for the kids to play at. It’s about a mile from the house to here.
Here is the view off the bike trail out onto Montery Bay.
I pass through a bit of a noisy neighborhood, and it can smell at times. Who would have thought that someone who spends so much time in the water could be so odorous. This is just one of the beaches where the local Sea Lion population hangs out at.
Through Cannery Row and on to the Warf in Monterey.
I think I’ll stop here and keep the rest of the commute for another day. Needless to say I have a pretty nice commute to work every day. Now if I just weren’t so lazy. Oh well. 
You can find full size pictures of my commute and more pictures also at
http://www.mytravelingfamily.com/gallery
We watched a late night program on the weather channel last night about Hurricane Katrina. It was one of those programs where they go and show how they predicted this could happen. (Funny how many people can do that after it happens.)
Anyhow, it was actually a fairly good program. Not too much bull crud. It’s funny how watching something like that 9 months and half a country away can still make it so I don’t sleep at night. I’m wooped today, didn’t sleep well at all last night. On the program they were showing what the area was like today. Still all tore up beyond belief. I picture all my old co-workers and friends down there dealing with it on a day to day basis. It seems so surreal that we went through it and now are living such a normal life so far away. I have flashes of the downed power lines as I rode my bike across them, dodging the tree branches and debree in the process. I remember the heat, the smells, how everything was a dull brown. The looks on peoples faces.
Ya. I remember.
Well,
I haven’t been writing much in this blog due to the fact that I’ve been constantly changing it. I believe I’ve tried at least two dozen themes so far and have messed with both side bar, header, layout, and most other items, and it’s not done yet. The more I learn PHP (the language this page is written in) the more I’m sure I’ll change things.
This is a fun way to learn something. Well, more later. I have some changes to make. (-:
Well, it’s official. Hurricane season 2006 has begun. And here are the nominee’s for this years fun and excitement filled season.
ALBERTO
BERYL
CHRIS
DEBBY
ERNESTO
FLORENCE
GORDON
HELENE
ISAAC
JOYCE
KIRK
LESLIE
NADINE
OSCAR
PATTY
RAFAEL
SANDY
TONY
VALERIE
WILLIAM
Here is the accuweather site.
http://hurricane.accuweather.com/hurricane/regions.asp?site=ATL
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